There is a strong case for a claim that the Fatah-led Palestinian national movement, as we have known it from the late 1960s onward, is fading from the scene.

While in practical terms the Palestinian national movement is an increasing irrelevance, the symbolic cause of Palestine nevertheless retains great emotional appeal both for the Muslim world as a whole and for a wide spectrum of Western leftists. The result: a new, loose, global, Islamist-led movement is emerging in its stead to carry the Palestinian banner.

The failed peace process of the 1990s indicated the central dilemma for the Palestinian national movement. It was not strong enough to achieve its maximum goal of destroying what it regarded as the illegitimate state of Israel. At the same time, with the defeat of Zionism at the very center of its worldview, it proved incapable of making the compromises necessary for a peaceful partition of the disputed area.

Following Yasir Arafat’s death in 2004, the Palestinian unity which he had created and bequeathed to his people did not long survive. The 2007 split between Arafat’s Fatah and the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas now has the look of permanence about it.

Hamas is entrenched in its semi-sovereign Gaza fiefdom. As a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, its natural partner in the neighborhood is the Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy in adjacent Egypt, rather than its Ramallah-based secular rivals.

As for Fatah, it is the local representative of the rotting secular Arab nationalist movements and regimes which are currently being eclipsed.

It should be noted that the “Arab Spring,” in terms of successfully toppled regimes, has brought down only secular Arab nationalist regimes of this type. Fatah and the PLO belong to the same era — and the same essential outlook — as the officers’ regime in Egypt, the Ba’ath regime in Syria, and the other examples of this type which are now exiting the stage of history.

Irony of ironies, the element keeping the Fatah-PLO rulers in Ramallah safe from their Islamist opponents in the West Bank is the army of their most hated enemies. Today, the only thing standing between the Palestinian Authority leadership and the fate of Bin-Ali, Mubarak, Ghadafi, and the rest is the Israel Defense Forces.

44 Comments, 25 Threads

1.
Terry, Eilat - Israel

What you call the Palestinian National Movement, by which you mean the PA run by Abbas the terrorist, embezzler, & dictator, is already dead, it’s rotting corpse just hasn’t been buried yet.
Israel should annex Area C & B + the Jordan Valley thus putting an end to the BS ”peace process” and any idea of a Palestinian state. Area A, run by the PA & which contains 95% of the Arab population, would remain as is.
The only Palestinian state is Jordan.

I agree completely with your assessment. Israel should assert its sovereignty over the entire West Bank and either let the Gaza Strip go to Egypt or annex it outright. A case could even be made for Isreal to annex the Golan Heights. At this point, why not just have Israel lay claim to every strip of land its people fought and died for in all of the wars since its Independence. At this juncture, there is no Arab neighbor up to the task of forcing their will on Israel. And any future war will likely lead to nuclear escalation. The Moslems will never again be able to eliminate Israel without it leading to total annihilation. Its long past time for Israel to become a full-fledged member of the free world of nations.

Under Menachim Begin the Golan become part of Israel. Of course, feckless leaders like Barak and Rabin have tried to negotiate returning it Syria in return for another worthless peace treaty signed with Arabs.

The reality is that Palestinian statehood is not the ultimate goal. Islamic world domination is, with the ultimate goal of a global caliphate that knows no borders. Palestine, if it ever does exist, would disappear along with every other nation on the planet. The Palestinian “cause” is merely a tool towards that end.

With the possible exception of exactly WHICH goons have larger than life posters of themselves all over Gaza these days, living best from the graft and intimidation, Arafats plan(s) are going swimmingly.

Remember Arafat was Egyptian, there is no such THING as a “palestinian”.
His goal of a “homeland” for his “people” was a sham from day one. He was a Muslim, doing Mohammad bidding….Lie to the Infidel to advance Islam.

He planned all along for the Ultimate Destruction of the Jewish State. He used the acquiescence and blind eye of the west to make inroads while biding his time awaiting the “push” from Muslim States that are (finally, in his view) at last flexing their Islamic Muscle.

Sure, he planned for Fattah to inherit the laurels and power …HIS crony thugs ensconced in riches and praise forever, instead of some one ELSES crony thugs…but the trajectory/result is exactly as he dreamed…

..maybe even better, given the “luck” of a Muslim US President happily speeding things along…

The great lie of Islam is that it is forward-looking, with a vision of universal justice. In reality, it is and always has been backward-looking–and not interested in justice, but in complete, tyrannous control over all mankind, in the name of Allah, one of those uncompromising, “jealous” gods from the time when human slavery was invented. It exalts the hummah, or Islamic brotherhood, and denigrates individual human rights, an ancient mindset the West outgrew through long and bitter experience, culminating in the American Declaration of Independence. And that Islamic lie is not dying, from all appearances.

The reformation? Martin Luther was a vicious anti-semite who asked any lord who would listen to destroy the Jews’ homes and keep them in stables. A lot of his statements about Jews cannot be printed in a family magazine.

A better term might be its “Gaza firebase”. Considering that the only things its “economy” seems capable of producing are rocket-artillery strikes across the border into Israel, its “protector”.

Israel is once more caught between a rock and a hard place there. Gaza acts as a buffer zone against an increasingly radicalized, Islamist Egypt, but it also is itself the haven for Islamist radicals who openly seek Israel’s obliteration.

Perhaps its time for the West to admit that there is no “peace process”, and never has been. Nothing but the Islamic world’s fanatic obsession with destroying Israel.

Of course, for that to happen, the West’s (pseudo-) intellectual elite’ would have to give up their own antipathy toward Israel, and that’s unlikely to happen. It’s a way for them to indulge in bigotry and still feel good about their own moral superiority, much like the “progressive” attitude toward “bitter clingers” here in the U.S. “Smart, sophisticated” people, like our President, don’t believe such atavistic primitives have a place in the Utopian society they dream of. And they don’t think Israel has a place there, either.

By comparison, they fall all over themselves embracing Islamists, partly from fear of the consequences if they don’t, but mostly I suspect because they think the Islamists will be the element that finally destroys the civilization they abhor- ours. And that afterward, the Islamists will acclaim the “elite’” as the new, destined rulers of the Brave New (Islamic Socialist) World. And will bow down, worship, and obey them forever.

“The answer is yes. But it is being replaced by a new phenomenon perhaps best described as a global, Islamist-led campaign for the nullifying of Jewish sovereignty.”

And the return of the caliphate. This is like a new form of communism, but instead of Marx these fanatics use religion, which would probably actually irritate Marx if he was alive today. A global political movement based on religion with the ultimate goal of having a global empire stretching from Asia to North Africa and Europe. I have no faith that the west is prepared for, let alone recognizes, this threat. You are already seeing it played out in places like Egypt and Iran.

The only question is, will the Muslims set aside their Sunni vs. Shia battle so that they can focus their attention on the west? Maybe. These people have been slaughtering each other for centuries, though, and it’s hard to see them stopping now, especially if Syria is any indication of what’s to come. Maybe that’s the west’s best protection. The Muslims may hate each other more than they hate the west. At least for now.

Something to worry about would be a MB take over of the greater part of Syria, along with a genuine MB consolidation of power in Egypt. Syria+Egypt+Hamas all under MB governments … real trouble for everyone …

In the end, what usually happens with would-be Arab “superstates” occurred. Their mutual suspicion and megalomania tore it apart.

One reason that the Muslim world, for all its “Caliphate” dreams, has never been even close to united is that everybody involved wants to be the Caliph. Add in the essentially tribalist nature of the culture, and actual unity is something that will probably never happen.

Even the various parts of the Muslim Brotherhood don’t particularly trust each other. The MB is less like a unified group like the Ku Klux Klan, and more like the old Mafia, specifically the Five Families that ran New York. They might have worked together on certain things, but they didn’t trust each other and were as likely to throw down on each other as to unite against anybody else. (The Apalachin Conference on 14 Nov 1957 wasn’t about uniting against the Feds; it was about carving up the late Albert Anastasia’s various “holdings” without resorting to another Castellamarese War.)

Once Syria is firmly in MB hands, and Egypt and Libya are “pacified”, I expect a similar conference between the leaders of same. But it will be less about uniting into a New Caliphate than it will be about deciding “spheres of influence”.

Yes, the UAE was Baathist. So was Saddam Hussein. He liked to feed people he didn’t like into wood-chippers. Feet first.

The Baath party was a multinational “Arabist” group that was formed in the 1920s, and consciously patterned itself on the rising Fascist parties in Europe, notably Italy and Germany. Like the older Muslim Brotherhood, its goals were Arab “unification”, and the extermination of Jews. Israel was not mentioned in its charter at the time because it didn’t exist as an independent state at that tie (pre-1948).

But the goals, and ideology, were in all meaningful ways the same as those of the Muslim brotherhood; unite the Caliphate, drive out the unbelievers, conquer the world, and kill the Jews.

As for the ways in which the Baathists were, and are, not exactly like the Muslim Brotherhood, I suspect that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or perhaps his creation, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street, London, would say;

There are not 2.4 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank by a long shot. There was an independent audit of their census figures in 2007 which showed that there are only 1.4 million in the West Bank. Why the discrepancy? First, the PA counts the 300,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem as their own so these people are double counted by Israel and the PA. Secondly, the PA counts people who have not lived in the West Bank for over 20 years but still might have plots or houses in their names. Third, they never count the yearly net migration of Palestinian men out of the country every year- thousands every year. Most seek opportunities in other countries. They use all sorts of gimmicks to inflate these numbers.

The Palestinians have a lot of reasons to inflate their numbers. They can put pressure on Israel of a “demographic time bomb” even though the Jewish birth rates are rising and theirs are falling every year. In fact the settlements have grown historically between 4-5% per year. They also get more foreign aid, water and power if they inflate their numbers.
The most likely thing that will happen is that Israel will impose civilian law over Area C (effectively annexing it-50% of the West Bank and including all the settlements)
Area A and B will be some sort of canton/Vatican City style country- with the level of autonomy they enjoy now but with local sheikhs and rulers once the PA collapses… and it will eventually collapse quietly. I think the West Bank will always have a somewhat nebulous jurisdiction. Israel can’t afford to surrender the mountain ranges or the Jordan Valley strategically.
Gaza will likely remain semi-independent or part of Egypt. It will always be more trash heap than nation.

But the bigger picture in the islamic world — and we’re watching it in Syria — is a three-way battle for supremacy in the Moslem world between the Ottomans, the Persians and the Egyptians. Israel is a side-show, albeit an extraordinarily vicious and vociferous sideshow. The next state to emerge in the Middle east will be Kurdistan, not palestine (small “p”). Or maybe a Syrian Sunniville, or Alawi-stan or some truncated hell-hole. Lebanon may go as the civil war crosses the border. Hezbollah is terrified…and they damn well should be. They are on their way out. The war right now in Syria is between Turkey and Iran. Iraqi Kurdistan and Syrian Kurdistan will unite over the years (with Israel’s help). Little Kingy Abdullah in the real Palestine is shaking in his boots. And what Mr. Spyer rightly wrote about Abbass, he could just have easily written about the Jordanian pretender.

Little Israel is doing fine as long as the Moslems are so damn power-hungry, for all the fear of them. Except for an occasional Bulgaria, they are only good at killing one another, while the European/Western idiots wring their hands. We are surrounding them…Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Black African states that border North Africa Islam, etc. Russia is cozying up. Even Iraq is using the Haifa port for exports; and the Saudis are our best buds re: Iran. And we are about to be a gas/oil exporter.

The “Arab Spring” — what a hoot! — is just another batch of a**holes killing another batch of a**holes. (Did anybody notice from NYTimes today: “President Obama could not have guessed that the demand for democracy in Arab countries would become one of his greatest foreign policy challenges.”) Amazing. Maybe he couldn’t, but my friends and I all did, and I bet most people here did too! Some things don’t change. Like hating Israel. But we’re doing fine.

A firm believer in “no good deed goes unpunished” I see all our attempts to placate the phoney grievances of the Mohamadans as a fools errand that merely puts us in more danger…in perpetuity.

Forget about “drones”, I’d rather solve the situation with ICBMS on all their capitals and shrines (except for that gaudy and obscene upside-down golden toilet bowl they built on top of your Temple…you can dismantle that when the time comes!)

So, if you see positive things for Israel coming from the the most recent P.M.O.V
(thats “Perpetual Muslim Orgy of Violence?)
all I can say is, I hope you are right.

The “Palestinian movement” has always been little more than a propagandistic cover for an Arab movement to wipe out Israel. If this is becoming more obvious to more people, then Israel only stands to benefit.

Araft was from Egypt. What a sicko. The so called Palestians still teach their children to hate Jews, and blow themselves up. Why is anyone giving them money? I know, to keep up the lie, and if they don’t get their money, the other Arabs place an embargo on oil.

Iranians are incredibly open to the gospel message of Jesus’ love and forgiveness. Many are disillusioned with the oppression of Islam and are desperate for the truth. Every day, more Iranians are hearing the hopeful message of The Way, The Truth and The Life through satellite TV broadcasts.

This piece exemplifies the reason why Congresswoman Bachmann’s and her Congressional allies’ work aimed at uncovering subversive Muslim Brotherhood infiltration at the highest levels of the Obama Administration, the U.S. State Department, etc., is so very important. Those condemning Bachmann are either enemies within or useful idiots. These include those on “our” side, Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, Speaker John Boehner and all the others joining the Muslim Brotherhood and MB frontgroup bandwagon.

7. Sean;
Islam is pretty firmly mired in the 7th century. A Large population was important then because it could produce more warriors. Battlefield decisions were mostly the result of numbers. While there were exceptions those were always the result of exceptional leadership. Great Generals are not always available. Islam is mostly bluff and bluster.
If you go to the UN or CIA web sites and add up population numbers by country and percentage of Muslims, you get between 800 and 900 million of them. Yet ‘official’ numbers by Islamic authorities are 1.4 to 1.6 billion, depending on which “authority” (yes, sneer quotes) you use. People in the west still do that too. At another blog on PJM I read that this deer season 600,000 hunters headed into the woods of Wisconsin. That is enough riflemen to be the 4th largest army in the world. 700,000 in Coach Jerry land, 250,000 in West Virginia, plus million more in the other states. He claimed the sheer numbers made America invulnerable to invasion. I’m thinking he might be a mighty hunter but he has NEVER seen the elephant. You use napalm to set the woods on fire, then send in Helicopter Gunships in to kill the survivors. In Iraq and Afghanistan we skipped straight to the gunships. I doubt that an invader would be that kind.
Body counts are out of fashion but StrategyPage claims 4,707 American died in Iraq of combat wounds. over 40,000 Islamic terrorists died in combat, with 114,000 Iraqi civilians biting the dust.
Mullahs can count as well as anybody. They know that the only way to level out that kill ratio is through suicide bombers, were they trade one for many.
So until the west gives up it’s fixation on hand tools and automates the death process, things will not change.
The key to that is developing robot troops. When we are killing them faster then they can breed, using ‘soldiers’ that are manufactured, they will seek terms.

This is just a phenomenon of the current arab world: pan-islamist insanity is sweeping out the old pan-arabist insanity. As dangerous as the pan-arabists were, the pan-islamists are even worse, if that’s even possible. It is the new pan-islamism (which is also sweeping the whole of the islamic world, not just the arab world) that the Dems and their Indonesian Dog_eating Retard are fully supporting and encouraging. This will not end well, at all.

Of course, the deep truth of the situation for the West remains unchanged – all threats from the arab/persian/muslim world start and stop with control of the gulf oil fields. That’s where their power comes from and without those fields the arab/persian/muslim world would be effectively defanged and neutralized. But, the West refuses to acknowledge this (much as we allowed the arabs and persians to steal the gulf fields in the forced nationalization waves of the mid 20th century which led to the original growth of the threats to the West from the arab/persian/muslim world) and we will suffer because of it. Much more than we need to. All for the idiocy of PC and giving in to those who hate the West and contribute nothing to civilization. After all the free trillions of petro-dollars that the arabs and persians have gotten (through no work of their own – the Saudis still can’t maintain the fields without outside help) what do the arabs or persians have to show for it? Nothing but destruction and threats of more destruction. Yeah … there are few mile-high skyscrapers built in the desert (where land is anything but scarce) but other than that the petro-dollars have served no purpose other than to harm and try to kill the West. And the oil weapon ever remains in the hands of our bitter enemies and savages. The weapon they stole.

I still hold out hope that the West will come to this simple realization before it’s too late – but, sadly, the odds are pegged around 10000000:1. Better than nothing, I guess.

Israel is growing stronger, demographically and economically, with each passing year. European public and elite opinion really doesn’t matter much. Many countries are more interested in Israeli technology than Arab/Iranian oil. The Chinese are busy doing deals with Jerusalem, and Putin recently paid a visit. US and European tech and pharma companies must have research offices and/or strategic alliances with Israeli companies. If they don’t, they’ll be eclipsed.

I wouldn’t worry too much about Israel. Even if Obama is reelected, he’ll be somewhat constrained by a Republican House and Senate. He won’t be able to damage Israel too much in four lame duck years.

You wrote a great piece about ‘palestinian’ movement but please, rectify the figures:there are 1.4 million arabs in Judea Samaria,not 2.4 !
Greetings to Terry from Eilat:
We haven’t got many news from you for a while
It is a pleasure to see you back and kicking !

Dont forget the legions of 5th columnists in the US trying to enable the caliphate-namely, the editorial staph of the New York Times, the Gray Lady with Alzheimers disease, with anti-Israel activists Thomas Friedmann, Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristoff, Maureen Dowd, our State Dept (whose budget should be reduced by 75% for failing to prepare us for the Arab Spring), CAIR, etc, and various incompetent professors at places like UC Berkeley and Irvine, whose track records worse than random

In good news today US just announced a new military deal with Israel. They will allow Israel to buy KC-135 refueling jets. They also are kicking in $80m for more Iron Domes.

The timing of the announcement as Romney arrives in Jerusalem is obviously a campaign ploy by Obama. The irony is that were it not for GW Bush Israel would not need Iron Domes. It was the catastrophic Palestinian elections in 2006 which Bush insisted on over Israeli objections that brought Hamas to power in the first place.

The tankers are great but may be too late to do anything about Iran now that everything is buried underground. They asked Bush for those years ago when they could have done some good but were turned down along with the request for bunker buster bombs.

The Palestinian national movement died on July 25, 2000 when Arafat walked out on the Camp David negotiations. Since then it is one long episode from Weekend at Bernies and the joke is wearing thin.

There is a little-known interview with the late Yitzchak Shamir where basically ways that Bush I was the first real anti-Israel President (that is, since the Arabs stabbed the US in the back under Naaser), worse than Carter.

Of ocurse, that only actual pro-Israel PResident was Reagan, and even he slipped during Lebanon.

Of course, that only actual pro-Israel PResident was Reagan, and even he slipped during Lebanon.

George W. Bush was the most pro-Israel President … in his first term. He was great. Unfortunately, Bush took a sharp turn leftwards in his second term and became a little worse than average supporter of Israel, as Condi Rice (the moron) would constantly harass Israel and identify with the palis, not to mention pulling out that stupid Road-Kill Map every time she was in the area – the agreement that the Pals had broken on the very first day and never took seriously while Israel had only accepted it with 14 reservations, which Rice dutifully ignored. Bush influenced by Cheney and Rumsfeld and his own Christianity was excellent for Israel. Bush influenced by Rice in his second term was just a little better than your average dem President had been for the State.

Of course, Bush Sr. hated Israel like no ones business. He was awful. And a terrible person who stupidly empowered the UN as the reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union – one of the dumbest moves in all of recorded history, and most dangerous, too.

Sadly .. compared to the Indonesian Dog-Eater none of this stuff even matters. There is nothing that has ever been in the same universe as the Ineligible Imbecile from Indonesia. But, then, Barky is as bad an America-hater as he is an Israel-hater, so … That any Jew (other than the totally lunatic self-hating Jewish leftists) would even think of voting for the Dog-Eating Retard (who has supported the sweep of pan-islamism like it was going out of style) is about as bad as any normal American who has even the slightest liking our of nation who votes for the room-temperature IQ America-hater.

Note that during the Opening ceremonies of the International Olympic Games in London, the Parade of Nations included the non-nation of “Palestine.” The IOC is filled with haters of Jews and of Israel, the land of the Jews. They do not know that the name “Palestine” always meant “land of the Jews” and “Palestinian” meant “Jew,” from the time that the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea to “Palestina” in 135 A.D., after having defeated the last Jewish Rebellion under Bar Kochba. (Hadrian wanted to eradicate all member of the Jews and Judea; he outlawed Judaism and renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina,” “Aelius” being his gens name.) Great Britain was awarded the “Palestine Mandate” after World War I, to be the homeland of the Jews.
Calling Arabs “Palestinians” is the consequence of the invention of the “Palestine Liberation Organization” (P.L.O.) by Gamel Nasser, ruler of Egypt, and the Soviet Union, haters of Jews, in Cairo in 1964.

Even if the Palestinians don’t want a nation, Israelis and supporters of Israel have no choice but to support one for them. The alternative is declaring Jewish sovereignty over West Bank, thereby turning millions of angry Palestinians into angry Israeli Arabs.

Other alternative is formal Jewish sovereignty over West Bank while refusing to give Palestinians the same political rights as the Israeli Arabs, then trying to explain why Israel gets to do what no other western, democratic nation is allowed to do.